The Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech has reopened its doors to the public after a period of two and a half months of closure in order to prepare a new temporary exhibition.
This museum structure, which opened its doors in the fall of 2017 near the famous Majorelle Garden, has chosen to launch its new cultural season in the most beautiful way, with an unprecedented exhibition entitled “A Moroccan friendship” on the menu.
In its temporary exhibition hall, designed as a cultural and artistic showcase, the Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech Museum thus pursues a program that particularly puts modern and contemporary creation in the spotlight, particularly in Morocco.
The public is therefore invited to discover, for nearly six months, an exhibition that explores the friendship and spheres of inspiration common to three internationally renowned couturiers: Tamy Tazi, Fernando Sanchez (1935-2006) and Yves Saint Laurent (1936). -2008), who share the same passion for Morocco, its colors, its exuberance and the abundance of its riches.
This artistic event is a testimony of the friendship between these three artists, who shared the same interest and the same passion for Moroccan know-how and heritage, said the curator of the exhibition, Mouna Mekouar.
It is also about showing how Tamy Tazi introduced them to this heritage by showing them embroidery and all the Moroccan know-how and how together they will transform the male wardrobe (jabadour, bournous, saroual and other Moroccan male clothes) to make feminine clothes to give a more important place to women in Moroccan and Western society, she explained.
And to continue that the exhibition also testifies to the importance of ancient embroidery, the renewal of the codes of Moroccan embroidery, in particular the caftan, in which Tamy Tazi will draw enormously and show how color will play a very important role for the three since it is thanks to the color that they will transform their ways of understanding the caftan, the dress, and ultimately create a whole new vocabulary.
According to those in charge of this museum, this exhibition, the first to confront the views of these three artists and to evoke the key moments of this dialogue which began at the end of the 1960s, brings together a set of masterpieces among the most representative of their research as of their complicity.
The exhibition thus wishes to reflect this friendship and this Moroccan passion which animates them.
In winter 1966, Yves Saint Laurent visited Marrakech for the first time; Love at first sight is immediate. From then on, he went there several times a year until the end of his career, to recharge his batteries but also to design his collections.
Tamy Tazi, consecrated a year earlier as a symbol of modernity and Moroccan elegance in the influential magazine “Vogue”, is one of the very first friendships that Yves Saint Laurent forges in Morocco.
As for Fernando Sanchez and Yves Saint Laurent, they knew each other, young men, at the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, and have remained close all their lives.
While the three friends lived in Casablanca, New York and Paris respectively, they met regularly in Marrakech, sharing the same fascination for the richness of the Moroccan decorative repertoire.
Indeed, Yves Saint Laurent loudly claimed the influence of Morocco in its creation. He knew how to appropriate but also to reinvent the burnous, the saroual, and other traditionally masculine clothes, to draw new feminine silhouettes.
He also knew how to borrow from Morocco his colors mixing bright and warm tones with others more sober.
“One cannot understand the rich and abundant itinerary of the work of Yves Saint Laurent without taking into account his friendship with Tamy Tazi and Fernando Sanchez, maintained for 40 years”, we read in a note presenting the said exhibition. Their works, which often resonate with one another, bear witness to this. Tamy Tazi, for his part, has been able to reinvent the caftan, giving it a more slender and more refined silhouette, offering women a new ease, while emphasizing their lines. She broadens its repertoire, playing with both dress codes and the variation of shapes and colors.
Through games of reconciliations and references, the exhibition shows how the visual universes shared by the three friends and fashion designers have influenced them, how, each in their own way, they have sought to reinvent them.
Thus, all the creations exhibited must be seen and perceived in the light of their reciprocal friendship and their permanent play of successive reinterpretations and creative revivals.
The Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech Museum is a real cultural center which has a temporary exhibition hall, a photo gallery, an auditorium, a research library, a bookstore, a café-restaurant, in addition to a permanent exhibition hall.
More than a retrospective including the “essentials” of Yves Saint Laurent, the permanent exhibition, anchored in Marrakech, is a journey to the heart of his inspirations.
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